"I grew up with Alex Pretti" - childhood friend writes about the Alex she knew

[CousinIT]

https://www.theverge.com/policy/868567/alex-pretti-minneapolis-childhood-friend

. . .

Alex and I grew up across the street from each other in a quiet neighborhood in Green Bay, Wisconsin, a town maniacal about its football team and without much else to do. The street we lived on had recently been a field, now populated with a smattering of three-bedroom houses rapidly constructed in a treeless subdivision. I met Alex when he was three years old and I was four. Our family’s lives were exceedingly visible to each other, without fences or much foliage, and we knew the comings and goings of one another’s households.

Alex was an easy playmate: generous, curious, sweet. His mother always ensured he had a tidy haircut and a clean room. He had a little sister. He told me the truth about Santa, and I told him the truth about where babies come from.


We rollerbladed and had sleepovers, excitedly dragging our sleeping bags across the street from one house to the other. We built palatial forts in the snowdrifts after the plows went through. Lawn sprinklers in summers became portals to different realms and time periods; we ran through the strands of water with towels tied around our necks as capes. When Alex had his bedroom window open, I could hear him singing all the way from my own open window. His voice was operatic and strong, carrying above the suburban drone of leafblowers and lawnmowers. He loved mandarin oranges and macaroni and cheese, and we agreed it was especially pleasing when all the food on our plates was orange.

Over the last few days, I’ve seen a lot of posts on social media about how you don’t have to watch the video, about how it’s okay to protect yourself from it, because we don’t need to watch another public execution. But when an Associated Press journalist called his parents after their son was shot, they hadn’t heard the news. The journalist sent them the video, and they said it looked like their son.

There is something destabilizing about having known someone only as a child and then hearing they were gunned down in the street. The person you see in your mind lying in that street is still a child. I’m sure his mother feels that way, too, or she sees him at every age all at once, including those he did not live to see. . . .

[Greybnk48]

1. Please accept my heartfelt condolences. Such beautiful memories.

I didn't know Alex, but you know how we are in Wisconsin and the Mid-West. I'm in Appleton and I feel like we lost someone in our extended family with both Alex and Renee. I'm just sick and so angry.